I'm tired of rebuilding every 1 year [mageia1&2 ]considered Debian stable, but knew it would involve more fussing about on the command line, than I enjoyI fled Ubun when unity broke up the family KDE seemed reasonable after gnome2

I don't spend much time on the desktop, so I don't care about effectsjust a menu to launch from [no throw it in big pile & search thanks]

virtual desktops are handy for a level of primary organizationbut these days I use chromium, my wife chrome & that's good enough

not having a clear easy to maintain path to picasa, I need another photo/editor manager that will upload to picasa webalbums in big chunks 100+. My present solution is digikam [which is KDE oriented] I need to be able to crop, little bit of color adjust, just the quick n dirty stuff

the music part is Clementine, so I can make playlists on flashcards, burn a CD or so

couple HP printers that seem to hook up with very little fuss on most any Distros

So said hell and switched over to KDE.The biggest boon for me is Apps open in Last Remember Size & Position in KDE. Which for me scrolling 3 workspaces with mouse wheel can switch quickly between opened and positioned apps in a workspace.Sometimes have 6-8 apps open on Dual Displays spanning 3-4 workspaces means minimal fiddling with and getting right to work..

So said hell and switched over to KDE.The biggest boon for me is Apps open in Last Remember Size & Position in KDE. Which for me scrolling 3 workspaces with mouse wheel can switch quickly between opened and positioned apps in a workspace.Sometimes have 6-8 apps open on Dual Displays spanning 3-4 workspaces means minimal fiddling with and getting right to work..

KDE [qt] even with effects & desktop search off, boot up is painfully slow [on a dual core with 4g ram, KDE. flies]even after boot digikam will not crash or freeze, but getting a fresh cuppa will keep me from adding more commands to the que of pending operations turning off resume last state, will speed up the boot I've had no luck finding ram that works for the PC's bigger than 256mb, [ there are 4 slots]I've sent back 12 sticks of 1g so far

if I cook up an Ala cart solution with qt & gtk elements, am I dooming myself to breakage down the road?a few gig of files, is no big dealI don't know of any Qt based lightweight DE'sI can live with dolphin, but prefer Nautilusk3b makes mores sense than braserodigikam is more user friendly than gimp[ gwenview, doesn't do minor corrections]

I'm just sort of riffing [brain storming] heremuch of my time is spent working around my ranch at this time of year, but I'll try to get a dualboot[separate hdd] goining in the next couple weeksI don't have

Hmmm Dual-core here and 8gb of ram. Boot up same as others and KDE 4.10 smooth and fast chimes in at bootup at 432mb.All effects smooth no lockups. All apps load fast and no pending commands.

Sounds like a driver issue? Not having 3d rendering enabled and your desktop doing all the graphics by cpu?Using Ati 4350 with the default open drivers and latest KDE 4.10 and everything smooth & snappy here.And supported graphics chipset critical in a usable desktop environment..